Natural Spectrum | Environmental Consulting

Natural Spectrum, LLC provides integrated environmental consulting and forensic services to help clients perform sound environmental investigations and manage liability.

Environmental Consulting Services

Natural Spectrum and our associated consultants employ effective and defensible study design and planning, based on conceptual site models and integrated quality assurance/quality control for field sampling, field screening and laboratory analysis, data quality evaluation, and data analysis. Our collective expertise includes environmental chemistry and forensics, data interpretation, and data visualization, and natural resource damage assessment. We offer the following key areas of expertise with applications for remediation, water resources, sediment resources, natural resources, and spill response:

Support for oil spill, NRDA & CERCLA-based investigations
Environmental studies sampling design and analysis planning
Forensic “fingerprinting” study design and execution

Source evalution for sediments in support of allocation strategies

Chemical data analysis and visualization
Geochemistry, fate & transport, analytical chemistry
Chemical fingerprinting & Isotopic fingerprinting
Multivariate and Univariate Statistics, Chemometrics
Age-dating, source identification and allocation
Litigation support

Natural Spectrum Team Consultants Help Clients to:

  • Better understand the problem, relevant environmental issues, and chemistry data needs;
  • Develop more informed strategies, supported by defensible study design, based on data quality objectives;
  • Reduce investigation and monitoring costs through effective design, planning & implementation, quality assurance, and data analysis/visualization;
  • Optimize decisions by using relevant data of known quality, with integrated evaluation/interpretive techniques, and applications of spatial-temporal analysis; and
  • Prepare for litigation with more favorable outcomes, supported by multiple lines of evidence and based on thorough data evaluation.

Environmental Forensic Evaluations
Environmental forensic chemistry investigations can be critical to the determination of liability and cost allocations between responsible parties at sites that have been contaminated. Environmental forensics applications include but are not limited to:

Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDA)
Source attribution of spilled products
Surface and subsurface releases of petroleum products
Air and vapor intrusion investigations
Investigations of fuel and oil spills
Support for liability management in legacy site cleanup


The environmental forensic process develops multiple lines of evidence with data generated from effective and defensible environmental sampling. Success requires application of the most appropriate forensic tools, as well as understanding of fate and transport as related to contaminant alterations.

Environmental forensic chemistry investigations typically utilize a multi-level tiered interpretive approach to support the identification of the source of the contamination that has been characterized by environmental sample analysis. The first tier provides a fingerprint for general identification purposes, and this may be followed by specific compound signature targeting. A subsequent third tier may also be undertaken, and involves diagnostic interpretation to further define source relationships to contaminated samples.

Integrated forensic approaches can be useful for addressing complex issues, as exemplified by this evaluation using traditional diagnostic PAH ratio analysis with state-of-the-art multivariate analysis:

Jordan, R.E., Cejas, M.J., Costa, H.J., Sauer, T.C., McWilliams, L.S., 2021. PAH source differentiation between historical MGP and significant urban influences for sediments in San Francisco Bay. Marine Pollution Bulletin 166 (2021). (click to see publication)

Randy Jordan, PhD

Principal & Owner, Natural Spectrum, LLC

Dr. Randy Jordan has extensive experience in environmental chemistry and forensic evaluations, fate and transport evaluations, as well as program-level technical management, project management and quality assurance for environmental programs. Expertise includes chemical and forensic characterization of various environmental media for weathering and source determinations pertaining to oil spills, pipeline releases and other Oil & Gas sector operations, PAH source evaluations pertaining to site impact from former MGP facility operations, and releases of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Fate and transport evaluations have included PAHs and metals in various aquatic systems. His experience includes project management of Site Inspection and Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study CERCLA investigations, CERCLA-based remediation projects, and Natural Resource Damage Assessment projects. He has performed project and technical management of environmental research projects, field investigations for oil spill responses and damage assessment, and marine baseline monitoring programs. Dr. Jordan has been responsible for quality assurance oversight at both program and project levels; NRDA, DoD and U.S. EPA QA/QC protocols, and data quality assessment.

EDUCATION
Ph.D. Chemistry, 1991, University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University
B.A. Biology, 1977, University of California, San Diego